Talk:Visual Molecular Dynamics

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(To whomever just added "citation needed", the list of VRChem authors is correctly listed at http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/allversions/release_history.html . The initial VMD release date is also correctly mentioned at that page. You can verify that release date for 1.0 at http://www.ccl.net/cgi-bin/ccl/message.cgi?1995+07+04+003 . While released on 1 July 1995, we made the announcement on that list on 4 July. To verify the VMD/NAMD connection, read Humphrey, William; Dalke, Andrew; Schulten, Klaus (February 1996). "VMD: Visual molecular dynamics". Journal of Molecular Graphics. 14 (1): 33–38.

The "citation needed" requests for OpenGL and Windows support are a bit silly, but sure. OpenGL was added in "VMD 1.3 alpha 1 (01/15/1999)", says http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.3/devel.html . Windows support was in "VMD 1.4 Alpha 1 (5/19/99)", says http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.4/devel.html .

The hand-off from Sergei to John is a bit harder to see in the public web, but Sergei released 1.2b2 on May 12 1998 (see http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/mailing_list/vmd-l/19359.html ) while John did the 1.2b3 release on June 25, 1998 (see http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/mailing_list/vmd-l/19363.html ). You can easily verify that John took over release management and primary QA from that point.

Haptic support in 2001 is described in [1] , with Grayson listed in section 8 as "Additional Authors." Volumetric support started with "VMD 1.8 alpha 4 (03/26/2002)" (at [2] see "Added first prototype code for general purpose volume texturing and contouring"). OpenGL Shading Language support was done by the time of 1.8.7 (see [3] after "Support for GLSL rendering mode"). The GUI rewrite happened by September 2003, since [4] says "Once the Windows, Mac and Unix ports have all settled down a bit after the big shakeup when we added MacOS X support and rewrote the GUI"

Who am I?

My name is Andrew Dalke. I am one of the original VMD authors and I was the primary maintainer of the software for a couple of years. I was happy to see that there's a page about VMD, but it contained some incorrect details about the authors. Jeff Ulrich was not one of the original VMD authors, but he was involved shortly after the main release. The information at [5] is incorrect. I've notified John Stone (the current primary developer) about that mistake. If you want to verify it, download the original release from [6]. The README clearly lists "W. Humphrey, A. Dalke, K. Hamer, J. Leech, J. Phillips" but does not mention Jeff anywhere.

I also filled in a couple of first names where only an initial was present. The text implied that the VMD/NAMD interface was implemented after John Stone became the primary developer, but such a link already existed, although it was of rather poor quality. (If you want evidence I can point you to the specific release containing the code.)

I don't know how to turn the above links into proper Wikipedia footnotes, and from what I've heard, I'm considered too close to the material by Wikipedia standards, hence this text for the talk section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.194.182.172 (talk) 22:09, 8 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]